The discussion was held over Zoom in September 2020 between Reet Aus, a fashion designer and activist whose eponymous brand oversees the UPMADE Certification, a system that Aus developed out of her PhD studies to help manufacturers integrate upcycling and circular economic principles into their manufacturing; and Alexander Taylor, an industrial designer whose early work in furniture and product design evolved into sportswear when he developed Adidas’s PrimeKnit knitted footwear for the 2012 Olympic Games. This year Taylor launched ATID, a technical apparel brand that produces editioned garments and accessories using deadstock sportswear materials.

Alexander Taylor The idea behind ATID was to create a platform for investigation and research into making. It was born from a conversation with the KTC factory in Heshan, China, whose director Gerhard Flatz had invited us to work directly with them. A lot of the design we’ve being doing for the last 10 years has been behind the scenes, so to speak – we’ve worked as consultants for brands, meaning that it wasn’t necessarily our final designs that were being realised. So the invitation from KTC was an opportunity to create our own product, where we could realise some of our ideas and handwriting. But we still wanted to find a real reason to work together – a defined brief that could make it authentic. When we visited the factory in China, we had a conversation about material waste and leftover materials. We saw warehouses full of what is essentially dead stock, but which remain high-quality technical materials. That’s where the idea of using those materials came from, which then drove the concept – limited edition pieces that work with the finite nature of the materials.

“Everything leftover has to go somewhere.”

— Reet Aus

Reet Aus Our brand initially came about through academic research. I was doing my doctoral studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where I focused on the environmental impact of fashion. I ended up working with waste materials and began mapping the industrial waste of the textile industry in Estonia. I was trying to figure out some kind of system for how we could implement upcycling within production, and was running a few projects working with postconsumer waste, pre-consumer waste, and industrial waste. But that industry is really small in Europe and it wasn’t until eight years ago that we were able to start an operation with Beximco, which is the biggest producer in Bangladesh. Beximco currently employs about 40,000 people and produces around 240m pieces a year, so we started to talk with its CEO about leftovers – it came out that they had no idea how much leftover material they actually had. Their factory is really huge, like a city, but they had no idea about what remained behind from production.

A detail shot from ATID’s product development.

Alexander The KTC factory we’re working with is small in comparison to that, so they have a very well organised inventory. If they’re not using those leftover materials for prototypes or our project, then they have an arrangement with a local furniture factory to shred and use them for fillers. They also have guidelines on materials not ending up in landfill or being incinerated. But there are occasions, I’m sure, where climate conditions in some countries are not conducive to storing materials: the humidity and temperature in China or India, for instance. Things would just rot. There are other problems too. We’ve talked to some big materials suppliers which have really high-quality, expensive materials, but there’s a culture where they don’t want to store them because it costs money. There is actually a business incentive to get rid of materials.

Reet Everything leftover has to go somewhere – these places don’t necessarily have proper waste management systems, so leftovers end up on the black market; or they’re dumped in nature; or they’re burnt, which causes huge air pollution.

Alexander I’ve had smaller clients through which I’ve visited factories you just wouldn’t work with. You see the reality of what goes on there, where some of the products in the world comes from, and it’s pretty scary. I’m fortunate only to have worked with high-quality factories, but no matter how high the standard is, you’re still seeing considerable waste because the quantities are so huge. Quality control is a big part of it, for example. If you’re losing 5-7 per cent of 3.5m pairs of shoes a month through quality control, that’s a lot of product. Where does it end up? Keeping governance on where products that fail quality control actually are, and not having them end up on the black market, is something that brands have to put a lot of time, energy and effort into.

An image from Reet Aus’s work in Bangladesh.

Reet Even though a lot of brands say that they don’t have leftovers, you can immediately see it’s a problem when you visit the factories. With Beximco, our first step was to analyse its operations, and we figured out that mass production factories end up with around 20 to 40 per cent of all production as leftovers. One very big type of leftover is overproduction, which accounts for 3 to 5 per cent of everything produced. Unfortunately, those pieces are complicated and expensive to upcycle because they’re made from different materials that have been bonded together. Leftovers from the cutting table are a second form. You can more or less use those materials as is, but it takes a lot of effort to make something new out of them. The biggest source of leftovers, however, are actually the rolls themselves, because these factories have huge stocks of materials. Those rolls are easy to use and bring back into production because, bar the cutting pattern, the processes you’re putting them through are exactly the same as those in normal production. So it’s really just a matter of organising the factory and putting a system in place. The best way to do that is for the brand producing the original product to know what they will have left over and factor that in to the initial design. Reducing waste is something you have to consider in the design phase, it’s not something you only deal with when production is done.

Alexander It really is a huge responsibility, because the designer’s role reaches further than you might expect – you should be considering the whole life of a product, from the moment you make the first mark on a page, through to the design, development, production and afterlife of the product. It’s the designer’s responsibility to be involved with and understand the consequence of their decisions. You’re trying to be as efficient as possible and understand every aspect of any decision you make, because your responsibility is to have that kind of awareness. You can’t make decisions that are going have a huge impact on the other side of the world. You as the designer, and the brand as well, have a responsibility to have a clear design manifesto from the beginning.

Reet There’s a little bit of a business concept there too, because it represents a completely new model. The numbers we found at Beximco were surprising to top management, for instance, because these factories try to produce as fast as possible and keep prices as low as possible.

Alexander The opportunity, from a business perspective, is huge. There’s not only a responsibility to get it right, but an opportunity to make money. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not all about the money, but it does provide an opportunity to create change which is the most important thing. We’ve seen from working with bigger companies that any efficiency saving can become huge when scaled. You make something half a per cent better, quantify that by 200m t-shirts a year, and you have a vast difference. It’s about looking at every step because, from a business mechanics and economic perspective, there are huge gains that can be made. I think that brands are aware of this and they have a responsibility to not just leave these things up to the factories they’re outsourcing to. For a long time there was a culture in design that you would send off a set of drawings to a factory and then the product would be sent back after a round of development. My experience of going to a lot of factories as a designer is that you’re just put in a room. You could be anywhere – you don’t see what’s on the other side of the fence, so to speak.

“There is a business incentive to get rid of materials.”

— Alexander Taylor

Reet My experience has always been that factories are happy when you provide some kind of solution for what to do with leftovers. They’re not waste management companies, so it’s a problem they face every day, especially when the management is not organised. In Europe you have to pay to get rid of leftovers, so it’s actually quite an expensive thing to do. That’s why we made the UPMADE certification, which is set of guidelines and a system to help manufacturers integrate upcycling and circular economic principles into their production. We go into a factory, certify it, and then start producing there. It gives the factory new possibilities – it helps them organise their leftovers and actually understand how they can use them.

Alexander But how much can you achieve as a designer? There are a few things you can identify and propose a solution to, but in the case of the big brands it’s the business guys who are making the deals with the factories. They’re the ones who are actually responsible for production. The designer, by contrast, has to go to the developer, who may then have to go to a local team. It’s that team who are responsible for looking after the factories for a brand, so the distance between the designer and the guys on the factory floor is huge. They’re not in sync. There are moments where you kind of cross them in the factory, but if it has taken four or five years to set up a production line and use a particular assembly, the factory is not going to want to change that because it’s a huge investment. When we were working towards the first knitted shoes with Adidas, for instance, we visited factories making millions of meters of warp knit. A supplier may be in South Korea and their product is being designed by a local team of two people who are essentially determining what sports apparel worldwide is going to look like for the next season. Then the designer, who is back with the brand, selects from that supplier’s books. Ultimately you’re just selecting textiles – you haven’t been involved in their creation.

Reet It’s important to understand who should deal with these issues. I had a very interesting roundtable a few weeks ago with some people from the industry and the European Commission, and the main question was, “Who should take responsibility for our waste?” Is it the producer’s responsibility or, when it’s post-consumer waste, should the government take care of it? That’s a good question, because if we’re not even able to decide who should deal with our waste, we can’t start solving the problem. France is a good case study, insofar as its Extended Producer Responsibility legislation makes it the producer’s responsibility to take back their post-consumer waste, while 2020 has seen further legislation that means producers can’t destroy returned or unsold goods.

Alexander But even if it is the brand’s responsibility, they’re mostly working with factories who they’ve essentially subcontracted to. Then that’s the grey area. A brand is told they need to order X amount of textile, and they’ve suddenly got 20 per cent leftover. “Well, the factory said we needed to order that.” So whose responsibility is it then?

The KTC factory where ATID produces its garments in Heshan.

Reet Exactly. Usually the contracts are arranged so that everything that isn’t needed stays with the factories, which is something I’ve been trying to understand. Brands don’t care, so the factory has to deal with it. But at the same time, if there is a logotype or pattern on the material that is recognisable, they can’t sell it. From the factory side, interest in our UPMADE Certification is high. We could certify a lot of factories, but even with that certification, they still need clients who will buy upcycled products. This year, for instance, we’ve been in conversation about the certification with five or six very big brands who think it’s a good idea, but it really has to be implemented at the design stage to succeed. But it just becomes too complicated for the fast fashion model – they need to change their business model too. Really, businesses should be run differently and they need to implement circularity from the top down. At the moment, only the smaller brands are ordering UPMADE-certified products for their collections. It’s very easy to convince factories, but it’s only with brands where these issues really become visible. So you have a situation where brands don’t take responsibility for leftovers, meaning that factories have to deal with them, but they can’t because they aren’t able to sell them. That’s the real problem.

Alexander As a designer, I’ve found that the best way to create change is to somehow have proof of a new, more efficient method of production and to keep going with it. If a brand wants it, they’ll make it happen eventually, but you’ve got to jump through a lot of hoops first. Oftentimes you can come up with really efficient solutions developed on a particular machine, but if that’s not the machine the factory wants to buy, then suddenly it’s out of your hands because it’s a business decision. I wish that there was more of a conversation, but you can’t do everything. You have to do your talking as a designer through the product and hope that eventually things will be updated down the line.

Reet My opinion is that legislation is the only thing that will change big industry and the big brands. I think an environmental tax will come into play and what the EU is probably planning to do is introduce some kind of certification. One idea I have heard is that they would like to tax products differently, so that more transparent products cost less. If that happens, it’s a perfect system to help the industry move towards sustainability, but if you think about the global situation it remains tricky. If we set up rules in Europe, and are the only ones to do so, then it’s difficult for our companies. We need a global understanding if we’re talking about moving towards circularity. Of course, in an ideal world there would be just one type of mono-material that we could recycle endlessly, and we wouldn’t have to use oil or grow cotton, et cetera. So looking forward, there are a lot of scenarios that would be sustainable, but the complication is actually arriving at them.

Alexander Legislation is important, but the challenge is in finding the continuity for something to run globally and without loopholes, because people will always find any loopholes.

Reet We’re sat here in Europe, but all the production is happening elsewhere and it’s not going to come back. We don’t even have the land or space to build it up again, and most of the innovation has already moved anyway. This has then created problems in European schools, because we’re educating designers without them ever seeing proper production during their studies. We simply don’t have it here for them to visit. They don’t have the understanding of how a big factory works, which puts them in a position where they don’t know what would make a better product or what it would be like for them to produce.

Alexander When we talked about sustainability at college, it was really just a material exercise and nothing more – at that time, everyone was suddenly wanting to make things out of whatever was to hand. We never looked into the huge opportunity there is now to approach that subject. My motivation was always to follow the less-is-more approach, in part because I was running my own studio and so saw that every penny counted. I think that having that experience of actually making and selling your own product is a very good thing, because it enables you to understand every single aspect of the system – the highs and lows of it, everything that can possibly go wrong. You start to anticipate problems, which is a big part of being efficient.

“You have to do your talking through the product.”

— Alexander Taylor

Reet Very often when I speak to people about these issues, they say “Oh, but you’re all ultimately in the same industry, you’re kind of doing the same thing as any producer.” No, it’s not like that at all. If you need to buy a t-shirt, buy an upcycled one. Buy a sustainable product and then you can be part of the solution. Money is not bad, you just have to put it towards the right things. That’s how you can actually make a change. Of course you should support ethical businesses and the right people with your money – I always think about whom I give my money to, because I work hard to get it.

Alexander I do think the consumer has a huge opportunity to bring change by not buying, and that’s something where I have hope that we will see change. Because of the pandemic’s economic impact, people are going to have to be more careful. I think that’ll have more impact than legislation.

Reet I was more pessimistic before coronavirus. People are now not travelling so much, they’re not spending as much money, and I have the feeling that they are willing to buy better quality goods because they have that little bit more money. This is something I can see here in Estonia. It’s a small step, but people are really thinking about local production, what they consume, and how their actions can influence industry. In that respect, France will be interesting to watch this year in terms of its new legislation, because the situation as I understand it is really complicated. They have huge amounts of post-consumer waste, which they take back, but now because of coronavirus they also have huge stocks of unsold clothes because retail almost collapsed. They can’t resell those, because they’re not in season, so they have a vast amount of very high-quality clothes with no real possibility for recycling because they’re all mixed material. The problem is just growing and growing, and we can’t landfill our textile waste anymore – we have to face it. Given that we don’t have solutions at present, I’m interested to see how we will tackle that. I think there will be many bankruptcies in this coming year, because it’s very, very difficult for big companies to adapt to the new rules.

Alexander I have a concern that while this year is bringing change, people will fall back into old habits. Because it’s harder to go and make that extra effort at present, the quick or easy fix becomes attractive. Then there is this issue that a lot of warehouses around the world were closed during lockdown, with nothing moving out or being distributed. All of those garments have become dead stock, not only through missing a season, but also by virtue of no one having been able to access them for that amount of time – it’s just a backlog of material to deal with. People shopped online, so you might think that a lot of product was still moving through the digital, but brands’ online and store inventories are totally different. A lot has been lost.

Panellists Reet Aus and Alexander Taylor

Photographs ATID and Reet Aus

This article was originally published in Disegno #32. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.

Dead Stock, Live Stock

The Design Line: 13 – 19 August

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